Thursday’s Buzz: 4.25.13

When Dean Esserman took the helm of the New Haven Police Department in November 2011, his marching orders were clear: reduce violence in the city and improve police relations with the community. The city had just reached a 20-year high in crime, after a tumultuous year that saw a total of 34 homicides. Seventeen months later, the number of homicides in the Elm City has dropped by 50 percent from 2011 to 2012 — a fall that Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and other city officials have largely attributed to the police department’s switch to a model of community policing that moves officers away from their desks and puts them on walking patrols throughout the city. But despite the success of Esserman’s community-oriented policing strategy, larger structural issues remain key drivers responsible for the city’s crime rate — problems that city officials and crime experts said must be addressed in conjunction with community policing to eradicate sources of crime. Lorenzo Ligato explores in tomorrow’s News.

The Yale Entrepreneurship Institute is piloting a program this summer to teach roughly 15 students how to build the next Reddit in exchange for over 400 hours of their time. On Wednesday, YEI accepted students into its first ever Tech Boot Camp — an intensive 10-week crash course in web programming from May 22 to July 26 that is free and comes with two meals a day, plus a $1,500 stipend for housing and living expenses. Through a fast-paced curriculum geared toward fostering student tech startups, participants will leave as web developers who can handle all aspects of online application design of moderate to significant complexity, said course instructor Adam Bray ’07.

Twelve years ago, Helen Siu founded a tiny intercultural studies program in Hong Kong. At Yale, she will now head a half-million-dollar program to connect Asian scholars across the world. Last week, the Carnegie Corporation of New York awarded a $500,000 grant to Yale to support the “InterAsia Initiative,” an effort led by Siu between Yale and six other universities and think tanks from New York to Lebanon to encourage collaboration between scholars of different Asian cultures. The grant, which is planned to last two years, will pay for two InterAsian studies post-doctoral fellows at Yale, a number of Yale professors and graduate students to attend an InterAsian conference in Istanbul this fall, an InterAsian studies conference on campus in 2015 and an online database for the sharing of Asian studies scholarship. Siu, who is an anthropology professor and helped bring the grant to Yale with fellow anthropology professor Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan GRD ‘96, says she hopes the grant will break down traditional divisions in Asian studies scholarship and inspire a new generation of scholars to see the multiple interconnections between different eastern cultures.